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Rooms Booked Six Months Ahead
Italian Research Station - Friday, April 7, 2000

DISPATCHES

Berg

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Mountain Zone, I'm calling you on Friday morning from Lobuche, what we're now beginning to call upper Lobuche. This is the location of the Italian Pyramid, which you began to hear about a few years ago probably. As I recall, '91 was the year the Italians moved up here and put this research station in. I know they were here in the autumn '92 when I had my expedition.

Now it's evolved into a very, what you might call by trekking standards, a very upscale lodge and we stay here. We book this place months in advance and I send runners up to make sure we got some of the few rooms here. Some of the trekkers we meet along our way aren't particularly happy with that because this becomes a pretty desirable location once you get this high in the Khumbu. The thing about Lobuche is there is no middle ground, you're either up here at the Italian center in the nice lodge — it's quite small and very nice rooms, or you're down in Lobuche...which the soul of Lobuche over the years has been the smell of various human wastes and the tinkle of yak bells, as I described earlier, but it gets a little less pleasant when it's in such a crowded, dusty scene. And Lobuche itself has never been a very pleasant place for us even when we come down from Base Camp.

So we're just – were thrilled – to be up here at about 16,400 feet. I'm looking up at an icefall, a hanging glacier that comes off of Lobuche peak. We're up in a kind of hidden, secret kind of an area of this glacier. We're quite a bit above Lobuche itself. The Italian Pyramid is a sort of, by Nepal standards anyway, a futuristic looking pyramid with solar panels to the south and east and the lodge is just below that. Kind of a unique place.

We're very close to Base Camp now, as you know. We'll be moving to Gorak Shep right away this morning, not that long a walk. I keep telling the group here, 'well we're gonna get back in that real mountaineering experience.'

We'll be camping tonight, camping at about 16,800 feet, so back into the tents. The weather this season in the Khumbu has been exceptionally dry and warm, and dry throughout the winter, and we're seeing some effects of that in the dust and the brown colors everywhere. But also exceptionally warm. You always feel when you're at 16,400 feet say, you always feel the effects of hypoxia. You're gonna be colder at a given temperature — we walk around in our down jackets — but the edge is off the cold as I remember it from Lobuche and we're hoping that holds as we head up to Base Camp tomorrow.

— Wally Berg, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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